


Each Day is Valentine's Day

by Verlaine



Category: The Professionals
Genre: M/M, Older Lads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 05:59:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verlaine/pseuds/Verlaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the showing up every day that counts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each Day is Valentine's Day

Sometimes when Doyle wakes him in the middle of the night, wheezing and gasping for air, Bodie feels resentment sawing away at him like a dull knife. He wants to go back to sleep, wants to roll over and pretend he can't hear the sibilant hiss of air in ever-tightening bronchia. Instead, he gets up and fetches the inhaler, which Ray always manages to leave in any room except the one he's actually in. He rubs the shuddering back, and murmurs words he tries to make sound comforting even though most of him is barely awake and the parts of him that are wish he weren't.

Bodie can't understand why during his days in CI5, when it seemed like he was running on a permanent adrenaline high, he could fall into bed and be out like a light, and now it usually feels like he hasn't slept through the night in a year.

He knows that Doyle feels the same resentment towards him when a meal ends with him making an undignified sprint for the bog, courtesy of what's left of his stomach. Doyle loves to cook. He's got a cupboard full of cookbooks in the kitchen and pores over them the way other men do over a stash of porn magazines. In deference to Bodie's tricky guts, most of them are never actually used. Bland, boring and low-fat is the order of the table. When they go out, Bodie always has to argue with Doyle to get him to order the things he'd really like from the menu, instead of sticking to Bodie's limits.

He's not sure which of them resents that more.

Tonight, however, the emotion that fills him when he wakes isn't resentment. He managed an uninterrupted hour or so on the sofa in the afternoon; supper was vegetable ravioli, made from scratch by Doyle, who basked in satisfaction all evening. And though it is Ray's breathing that's awakened him, it's not the sound but the location that's got him awake.

Wide awake.

As he slides his hands through Doyle's curls to pull him closer, Bodie decides, not for the first time, that it is neither sleep nor food that forms the basis of his life. Those he can manage as he must. This, this being with Doyle, is life itself.


End file.
